At 2:44 PM 12/28/99, Maria & Doug Storm wrote:
Gabriel, you answered my question, actually. But I'm a little confused now; are you solely using Amazon for it's data and ordering service? Why does a customer come to your site then, rather than just using Amazon?
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 15:59:19
Gabriel, Thanks for taking so much time and effort to answer me. And to answer your question, I found you, as you say others due, in doing a search for some volumes of Emerson's Journals on Yahoo! My interest also stems from the fact that I am a sales manager for R. R. Bowker's online reference productsBIP, LMP, Ulrich's, etc. I'm always interested to find out where people are getting their data. The chain of connections is interesting.

You know that Amazon gets their bib. data from Baker & Taylor. I'll check the site out some more and maybe get back to you again. Thanks so much for the time. Doug

Well Doug, that's a question I have asked myself repeatedly the past two and a half years since I signed up as an Amazon associate. But I had an elder female cousin recently give me an answer that complemented the one I had usually accepted as close to the truth. Fact is, I think people, mostly students, find my site through a random author search on one of the larger search engines such as Alta Vista or Yahoo, and because I have been in existence since April, 1997, have steadily been building up visitor hits one way or the other, and include a rather obscure (save to students) reading list, they tend to find my site near the top of the search returns, click, and either decide to buy a book on my virtual shelves, or else find something else at Amazon via a click through which still garners me a referral commission.

My cousin however suggested that she would be more apt to buy from a personalized reading list she respected than she would directly from a huge mega distributor.

So the combination of these factors is what drives a few dollars into my pockets, not much mind you, but after this past holiday rush, certainly enough to make the store efforts in the past, seem worthwhile. I think your own experience should help summarize this phenomenon. How did YOU find the Bookskellar?

My bibliography is merely one man's collection of personal reading projects and contrarian viewpoints centered around nothing more than the desire to run a little bookshop of my own. Of course I haven't put in as much time as I would like in expanding my shelves. It does take quite a bit of HTML clean-up to prepare authors for the Bookskellar site.

I am interested in Jim Carroll titles etc. Can I contact you by phone? If so what is the number?Jan Williams

Jan, I am not adverse to giving our my phone number, but it is most likely unnecessary that we actually talk. I presume you must be experiencing trouble trying to order from the Bookskellar site. This problem is due to the fact that our supplier (AMAZON.COM) has gone offline temporarily, and has been so for about a week. These technical difficulties may yet continue for another week according to a memo I received yesterday from the AMAZON folks.

I regret any inconvenience to you in these matters and am quite dismayed that Bookskellar customers are being turned away under circumstances I cannot control. If you can wait out this technical difficulty AMAZON is currently experiencing, returning to:

http://www.imote.com

Internet Girls

...and the Bookskellar, you should be able to place your orders with no problem shortly. Outside of what you can read from our online catalogue, there is really no further information I can provide you about any specific Jim Carroll listings.

However, once AMAZON is back online, clicking on a particular Jim Carroll listing will take you to the JC listing on the AMAZON site where often there IS some further information on that particular title.

I hope this clarifies things for you, and thanks for your interest in our books.

Gabriel Thy

P.S. Wed Jun 18 07:46:30 1997 Amazon.com returns to its online place in the hearts of millions

NOTE TO READERS: Steve Taylor was always looking for the next killer tweak of the early WWW which had only been invented two years earlier with the first graphical browser, Mosaic. He was tireless in his pursuit of gadgetry, bandwidth maximization, and the possibilities of the fledgling technology. To my own credit, I was doing a similar thing, but was not interested in what others were doing. Instead I was ecstatic that I finally had a platform upon which to create, and was taking each step to push my own possibilities. Steve's noetic opinion that I was one of the very earliest designers who was continuously pushing the envelope for animated GIFs and image maps in both functionality and aesthetics was perhaps not as appreciated by me, as it should have been. Those early months of the WWW negotiating HTML tricks, bandwidth limits and competing screen resolutions were indeed heady days. I was always looking for a partner, not flattery. I still think the sabotaged partnership a great shot for both of us, but I am thankful that Stephen Edward Taylor was there to offer his running critiques.

***

Ugh. What a 70s flashblack mess that site has turned out to be today with a hack or two of rogue code. Okay, I liked the "Dig Your Own Hole. Click here!" animated GIF, but the rest of that gizmodo is too much. I've never been to Las Vegas, and don't really want to if I had to ante up my own dime. Maybe with an expense account like Hunter S.... Of course there is some decent style here and there on the Sonicnet, but I really am annoyed by the flashing goo goo...reminds me of this 1970s-1950s retro burger drive-in in the south, cheesy and greasy, NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. But this topless bar peep show motif is just nasty, creepy design...

Don't know if you checked out the Bookskellar. I had a couple of errors in EVERY page that took me two swipes of file repair and FTP to alleviate, but it looks good now, except when testing just now I couldn't get a connection to AMAZON DOT COM, so I've still not seen complete and replicable success!

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"Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously."